Takes on sports, media, music, politics, culture, being a suburban husband and father in the Space Age.

Sunday, March 7, 2010

The Hurt Locker

Saw "The Hurt Locker" last night. I've heard that it will win the big award tonight, and I hope it does. I've now seen 6 or 7 of the 10 nominees, and I really enjoyed most of them, with maybe the exception of "Inglourious Basterds" which I thought was just okay. Something about altering the history of WWII for fantasy sake rubs me the wrong way.

"The Hurt Locker" succeeds on a number of different levels, it is a movie about the most politicially charged War of my lifetime without any politics, which is no small feat. One of the things I walked away with was how war changes people, how we ask these people to do amazing things that have no real translation once they come back home. The movie had a very real quality about it, these were not recognizable Hollywood types doing recognizable Hollywood action movie things. The characters while particulary heroic were hormented, conflicted but in a very real and very human way.

I think that it is important that Americans think about Iraq in a very real way, and recognize what we are asking of our people to do effects them, ourselves and others in a very profound ways that have consequences.